added an 'e' to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him.'
Not even a titter! But how their hearts thump and patter, how their hips jolt this way and that, how their heads loll and nod-and their eyes roll inward, completely disappearing into their untrained little skulls-just to hear Hester the Molester; not to mention see the disjointed nonsense that accompanies the sound track of her most recent rock video! You can understand why I needed to sit by myself in Grace Church on-the-Hill. This week I was reading 'The Moons of Jupiter'-that marvelous short story by Alice Munro-to my Grade Can Lit students, as the abrasive Ms. Pribst would say. I was a touch anxious about reading the story, because one of my students-Yvonne Hewlett-was in a situation all too similar to the narrator's situation in that story: her father was in the hospital, about to undergo a ticklish heart surgery. I didn't remember what was happening to Yvonne Hewlett's father until I'd already begun to read 'The Moons of Jupiter' to the class; it was too late to stop, or change the story as I went along. Besides: it is by no means a brutal story-it is warm, if not exactly reassuring to the children of heart patients. Anyway, what could I do? Yvonne Hewlett had missed a week of classes just recently when her father suffered a heart attack; she looked tense and drained as I read the Munro story-she had looked tense and drained, naturally, from the opening line: 'I found my father in the heart wing ...'
How could I have been so thoughtless? I was thinking. I wanted to interrupt the story and tell Yvonne Hewlett that everything was going to turn out just fine-although I had no right to make any such promise to her, especially not about her poor father. God, what a situation! Suddenly I felt like my father-I am my sorry father's sorry son, I thought. Then I regretted the evil I did to him; actually, it turned out all right in the end-it turned out that I did him a favor. But I did not intend what I did to him as any favor. When I left him alone in the vestry office, pondering what he would find to say at Owen Meany's funeral, I took the baseball with me. When I went to see Dan Needham, I left the baseball in the glove compartment of my car. I was so angry, I didn't know what I was going to do-beginning with: tell Dan, or not tell him? That was when I asked Dan Needham-since he had no apparent religious faith-why he had insisted that my mother and I change churches, that we leave the Congregational Church and become Episcopalians!
'What do you mean?' Dan asked me. 'That was your idea!'
'What do you mean?' I asked him.
'Your mother told me that all your friends were in the Episcopal Church-namely, Owen,' Dan said. 'Your mother told me that you asked her if you could change churches so that you could attend Sunday school with your friends. You didn't have any friends in the Congregational Church, she said.'
'Mother said that?' I asked him. 'She told me that both of us should become Episcopalians so that we'd belong to the same church as you-because you were an Episcopalian.'
'I'm a Presbyterian,' Dan said '-not mat it matters.'
'So she lied to us,' I said to Dan; after a while, he shrugged.
'How old were you at the time?' Dan asked me. 'Were you eight or nine or ten? Maybe you haven't remembered all the circumstances correctly.'
I thought for a while, not looking at him. Then I said: 'You were engaged to her for a long time-before you got married. It was about four years-as I recall.'
'Yes, about four years-that's correct,' Dan said warily.
'Why did you wait so long to get married?' I asked him. 'You both knew you loved each other-didn't you?'
Dan looked at the bookshelves on the concealed door leading to the secret passageway.
'Your father ...' he began; then he stopped. 'Your father wanted her to wait,' Dan said.
'Why?' I asked Dan.
'To be sure-to be sure about me,' Dan said.
'What business was it of hisT' I cried.
'Exactly-that's exactly what I told your mother: that it wasn't any of his business . . . if your mother was'sure'about me. Of course she was sure, and so was I!'
'Why did she do what he wanted?' I asked Dan.
'Because of you,' Dan told me. 'She wanted him to promise never to identify himself to you. He wouldn't promise unless she waited to marry me. We both had to wait before he promised never to speak to you. It took four years,' Dan said.
'I always thought that Mother would have told me herself- if she'd lived,' I said. 'I thought she was just waiting for me to be old enough-and then she'd tell me.'
